Rural Development and Project Planning

Book Review

(Grameeya sanvardanaya saha viyapruthi selasumkaranaya)

Authors: K. A. S. Wickrama and W. M. Leelasena
Sarasavi Publishers, New Edition, 2026 | ISBN 978-955-31-3748-7 | Rs. 1,250
Reviewed by
Professor C. A. Saliya

There is a particular kind of book that never goes out of date in Sri Lanka, no matter how many governments come and go: the field manual written by people who actually did the job. Grameeya Sanwardhanaya saha Vyapruthi Salasumkaranaya is exactly that. It began life more than 40 years ago as a training handbook the authors wrote while running the Hambantota District Integrated Rural Development Programme in the late 1970s and 80s, one of the earliest attempts in the country to plan development at village and divisional level rather than dictate it from Colombo. What’s being sold now is not a nostalgia reprint. It is a genuine new edition with relevance to the government’s current “Praja Shakthi” (People Power) programme, which is intended to revive the same idea: pushing poverty-reduction planning down to grassroots development councils and district coordinating committees.

That continuity is the book’s strongest credential. Wickrama, now an Emeritus Professor in the United States, who built a research career on the social and economic determinants of wellbeing, was also a career civil servant, and Leelasena, a career civil servant who directed the very programme this book grew out of and later advised government and donor agencies on rural development design, are not writing from theory outward. They are writing from four decades of watching planning documents succeed and fail in real villages, and the preface says so plainly — noting that many of the officers who once used the original handbook are still applying its logic today, even though the original text is now technically obsolete.

What the book actually does

Structurally, this is a project-cycle manual, not an essay collection. Six chapters walk the reader from first principles to final paperwork: what development and planning actually mean and the problems tied to them; how to gather usable data at village level; how to run the project cycle itself, including problem and needs analysis and project identification; how to test a project’s feasibility before committing resources to it; how to design a project and write the project report; and finally, how to monitor implementation, with an explicit section on “results-based monitoring” — a nod to the fact that older-style physical-progress tracking (did we spend the money, did we finish the pump house) is no longer considered good enough on its own.

The last chapter is where the book earns its keep as a practical tool rather than a theoretical one. It closes with a worked example: a small irrigation and seed-distribution scheme laid out as an indicator table, with inputs approved, pumps and seed distributed, harvest output increase, farmer income and each row tied to a named source of verification, such as the agrarian services officer or the cooperative extension service. This is, in effect, a simplified log frame, translated into language a village-level development officer or community leader can use without a development studies degree. That is precisely the audience this book is built for, and it does not pretend otherwise.

Is it actually useful to policymakers?

For the grassroots officer, the village-level development committee member, or the district coordinator tasked with actually writing project proposals under Praja Shakthi, this book is genuinely useful. It is short, procedural, written in accessible Sinhala, full of checklists and worked templates, and grounded in decades of field experience rather than borrowed foreign frameworks. If the problem is that Sri Lanka has good national poverty-reduction rhetoric but a shortage of officers who know how to turn a village’s problems into a fundable, monitorable project document, this book addresses that gap directly.

For a national policymaker trying to actually reduce poverty, inequality, or the psychological toll of prolonged economic hardship, the book is a capacity-building tool, not an evidence base. It does not present new research data on what interventions reduce poverty or improve wellbeing in Sri Lankan villages; it presents a method for planning and tracking whatever intervention has already been decided on. Its usefulness to policy is therefore indirect: it strengthens implementation capacity at the point where national policy actually meets people’s lives, but it cannot tell a minister which projects are worth funding in the first place, nor does it grapple with why past grassroots programmes, including, implicitly, the authors’ own original 1980s effort, did not resolve the poverty problem they were designed to fix the first time around. The preface itself is candid that the current poverty rate is roughly what it was decades ago, which is an uncomfortable admission sitting quietly beside a “new edition” of the same fix.

That said, dismissing the book on those grounds would be unfair to what it is trying to be. Sri Lanka’s recent crisis has left both government and NGOs scrambling to rebuild local implementation capacity that atrophied over the last decade. A clear, tested, Sinhala-language planning manual written by people with genuine field credibility fills a real and immediate gap, even if it cannot by itself answer the bigger question of whether decentralised project planning is the right lever to pull against structural poverty and inequality at all.

Grameeya Sanwardhanaya saha Vyapruthi Salasumkaranaya is a practical, credible, well-timed manual for people who have to plan and monitor rural development projects, not a policy research report. It is worth having on a district officer’s desk and in a minister’s office.

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